Studio Atlantic

Exploring, not explaining. Notes between studio and sea.

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VALDA BAILEY

Flying White

Chinese calligraphy has a delightful name for the happy accident. When the brush moves fast, the ink breaks and white paper flashes through the stroke. Calligraphers call it feibai, flying white, and they have prized it for two thousand years.

VALDA BAILEY

The Art of Failing to Copy

Say the word copying to a room full of photographers and watch everyone suddenly become very interested in their shoes. On the deliberate kind of copying, the kind that takes time.

VALDA BAILEY

The Silence Before the Song

What to do with loss? On moving to Portugal, the allure of fado and the line between drawing on a culture and decorating with it.

VALDA BAILEY

The Indecisive Moment

Never finished. Only trusted. Here's a story about Pierre Bonnard – it may be apocryphal, but I like to think not. He supposedly slipped a small box of paints into the Louvre, persuaded a friend to distract the guard, and disappeared to retouch one of his own paintings while it hung on the wall – a finished painting hanging in the Louvre, if you please! It would be good enough for most of us. Except Bonnard thought otherwise. I've already talked about how much time I've wasted on the Studio At

VALDA BAILEY

Beyond the Shutter

The single frame was never the point. New York, 2011. A hungry gathering of students after a gruelling day trying to unite light, colour and gesture into something that might earn an approving grunt from Jay Maisel. Ten of us round a table, mostly professional photographers. I had advanced since my first workshop with Jay, but I was still every inch a pretender, still in thrall to Flickr, where everything is a 'great capture!!!' and the likes get doled out like jelly beans. An instant sugar rus

VALDA BAILEY

Someone was Here

I care enormously about how things look. Design matters to me. Individuality, avoiding cookie-cutter perfection. The crisp white modernism of our age is something I struggle with. Nevertheless, for years I followed the usual advice about photographers’ websites. Keep the background white, or, if you want to be a little bit adventurous, grey; keep the type small and the personality elsewhere. Nothing must interfere with the photographs. The work is the thing, and it should speak for itself. So t

VALDA BAILEY

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(or is it?) Graphic design. Fonts. Colour. Margins. As a young teenager they held a strange fascination for me. On reflection, graphic design is a job that would have suited me well. However, as is so often the case, life took me down a different road and any fond ambitions I had of kerning words at midnight, moving logos three mm to the right then back again, or deciding which curly apostrophe was the right one for a Sunday remained a distant dream. The fork in my career path did not stop me

VALDA BAILEY

What's in a Name?

Why we chose Pedra do Ouro over the Algarve, the awkward language of expats and immigrants, and the appeal of a less polished life on Portugal’s Silver Coast.